I've gotten the "CHECK HARDWARE!" thing when using just the CPU.... I think it was caused by the laptop overheating (I was bored and testing some stuff out). I was using a Lenovo with Windows 7. A cold boot fixed it.

Do you have a specific rpc server set for your bitcoin client? Or some specific connect/addnodes in bitcoin.conf?

A buddy of mine got some weird stuff before when he was using an outdated version of bitcoind on a Redhat server. The newest client was throwing that error when he connected to the outdated install on the Redhat server.